ROFL at Science? Blog Brings Out Funny Side of Science

Dec. 2, 2010— -- A 15-year-old African girl got pregnant, despite having no vagina. She reported having oral sex with her boyfriend, and doctors surmised the pregnancy occurred through her gastrointestinal tract.

After a British woman suffered from a fever and a phlegm-laden cough for more than six months, doctors in the United Kingdom discovered she swallowed a condom.

Doctors at a Turkish hospital had difficulty treating a man with multiple injuries after a motor vehicle accident because the accident involved a truck carrying paint, and the victim was covered in brightly colored paint.

Hearing about these unusual medical cases may cause many people to react with shock or a chuckle, and that's exactly the idea behind the blog in which they appear.

NCBI ROFL is a blog created early last year by Meredith Carpenter and Lillian Fritz-Laylin, who were graduate students in molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In addition to medical mysteries, the blog features the abstracts of scientific studies that make the women laugh. NCBI is the National Clearinghouse for Biotechnology Information, a government-funded resource for information on molecular biology. It features a number of databases, such as PubMed, where many of the studies come from. ROFL is an Internet acronym for "rolling on floor laughing."

"We just saw some funny papers, and people were e-mailing them around, and we thought it would be great to have a repository for that kind of stuff," said Fritz-Laylin, who is now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

The blog, which Carpenter and Fritz-Laylin say gets about 50,000 page views a month, is similar in concept to Improbable Research, the organization that awards the Ig Nobel Prize every year to a scientific achievement that is both humorous and thought-provoking. The main difference, Carpenter and Fritz-Laylin say, is that NCBI ROFL highlights studies more regularly.

While the studies the blog features have all been published in scientific journals and may seem humorous or odd even to some scientists, Carpenter and Fritz-Laylin say it's important to point out that many of them do have value.